


Slipping On Gloves To Lay, Tenderly

by Agonist



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, Exeter Leap Funny Moment, F/F, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:07:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26110870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Agonist/pseuds/Agonist
Summary: It's a good thing intensely charged dancing is normal behavior among nobles, or someone may think there's something going on between Clementine Kesh and Gucci Garantine.
Relationships: Gucci Garantine/Clementine Kesh
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	Slipping On Gloves To Lay, Tenderly

Clementine Kesh has been to many parties since joining the Rapid Evening. At parties, people drink, do stupid things they may or may not want to forget, drink some more and forget regardless. Loud music encourages bad dancing. Someone vomits in the corner of the room, and it is embarrassing, but a compatriot is there to put an arm around your shoulder and help you to bed. People relax, loose-limbed and idiotic, not the starchy properness that a lady of her caliber must display at a ball. Here, the bar flows freely, but drinking more than a polite sip of wine is foolish. Dancing is a public test of upbringing. And if you vomit, only the Divines will have mercy on you. Clementine can't afford to let her ballroom skills go rusty, which is why she’s cleared a night on everyone’s schedules for a mock soiree. So there’s A.O. Rooke’s boombox instead of a band, and an inelegance of streamers hanging from the Fort Icebreaker mess hall’s exposed rafters instead of anything resembling finery. So rather than a procession of nobles with evasive glances and probing politesse, there’s Exeter Leap and Ver’million Blue, using each other’s gaping jowls as popcorn target practice. And sure, maybe no one except Clementine thought to bring a bare minimum selection of formal attire into an occupied military base. But the principle remains. There’s always something in the cards for Clementine Kesh.

She just wishes they were her cards.

Gucci Garantine sits across from her. Clementine couldn’t well not invite her, but she was banking on offhanded rejection. Horizon’s chairwoman is resplendent, as always, in scarlet, a boxy-shouldered suit, three pieces crisscrossed in black lines creating a fragile illusion of unity that shatters and reforms every time she moves. She’s always so extravagant, mesmerizing. Like her mech. Gucci only drinks red wine.

“It’s not a bad party, all things considered.” Gucci tries to break an iceberg with a toothpick.

“I did what I could with what I had.”

“Your crew seems to be having fun.” Gucci deftly avoids pointing out that her own crew has chosen not to attend. Out of the corner of Clementine’s eye, Milly stumbles backwards to catch some salt-fried excuse for a snack with her mouth, and hits the wall. A lone streamer comes loose from the rafters.

“That was not the idea.” The moment she finishes the sentence, Clementine realizes how absurd she sounds.

“At least we can chat,” Gucci tries. They used to just chat, about nothing. They’d trade turns, one holding the makeup brush and telling a story, the other listening in silence so talking wouldn’t mess up their blush. Now there’s only one topic. Broaching it would kill Clementine, and avoiding it corrodes her veins.

“Yes, well, this doesn’t feel terribly private.” While Clem answers, Gucci rests her fingers against the rim of her glass, sliding a slow circle around the circumference. Clementine remembers many a scolding for allowing her foul moods to sour her face at public functions. She wonders if Gucci ever got in the same trouble for fidgeting. Her leg doesn’t bounce under the table anymore. But, when unengaged in conversation, her gaze will dart about the room like a grounded bird.

“Granted. But no one’s paying us particular mind.”

Clementine sips boxed white wine, excavated from some backroom crypt. Its cheap sugar calms the bitter taste of her words. “There’s always eyes on me.”

“I see you’ve decided to be a handful tonight. Again.” 

Clementine casts her eyes down at her goblet. It’s anathema, how long they’ve known each other. Some fibers run deeper than the necessities of battle and the destructive pleasantries of small talk. They’ve both learned that there is no keeping a secret from someone like that. The thought horrifies Clem, and she shoves it away by barreling ahead with the conversation. “I’ve been wound up.”

Gucci motions to the room with her eyes. “Well, you ought to try for a good time.”

“I don’t tend to get much downtime during my...” Clem fumbles. “Downtime.”

Gucci laughs. Not the full, coy grin she’d share to match their childhood jokes. But it’s not discreet, either. A little too loud, a little too throaty. She wants to hold back, and she can’t help herself. After all the disaster that misplaced trust in her own crew has wrought, Clementine is ready to admit she is not the best judge of character. But she can see a decade of closeness etched in Gucci’s laugh lines, restrained by the soldier she’s become. It makes her want to spill her drink on her dress, rush to the sink hand in hand with Gucci, run together past the washroom and get lost in the maze of Icebreaker’s piping. It makes her want to throw her gloves across the table, replace them with pilot leathers, get in the Panther and trade blows with the Transgress Oblige until they’re both pulverized, get it all over with already.

But that’s what Saint Dawn is looking for, isn’t it? Clementine, off balance. Letting go of her end of the highwire tension on which their mutual secret balances. Gucci Garantine must crack first. The floor is open. Clementine Kesh is going to have the normalest night of her life.

“May I have the first dance?”

Only after Clementine has blurted out the offer does she realize she’s stood up, and is now offering Gucci her hand. The distinct possibility that her nemesis will turn her down comes to bite her. She’ll have to sit, ridiculous and mortified. What in hell possessed her? She’s trying to put more distance between herself and Gucci, not less! Ah, there is a fate worse than rejection. It’s Gucci’s hand in Clementine’s, a touch she hasn’t felt since she joined the Rapid Evening, still now stunted by her gloves. Gucci is lighter than Clementine remembered, or perhaps she’s only pretending to accept her support, and is bracing most of her weight against the table.

“I’d be honored.”

The small sea of the crowd parts for the dual authority of the commanders Kesh and Garantine. Clementine tries to focus on the similarities and differences, between her toughs' automated respect, and the condescending charade of a court towards the throne’s sixth-in-line. Where the cracks in the structure of authority would show, and who she could trust to fill them. She tries. The shock of Gucci’s hand in hers is barely palliated by the thin insulation her gloves offer. She turns to the vision, resplendent in her mind’s eye, of her future rule, the just world of the exemplary. Her fair and reasonable way. Last time she had this vision, her rival was there. If she can’t figure out the rest tonight, she will figure out Gucci Garantine.

The boombox opens fire with an unexciting mid-tempo keen, all the more phlegmatic for its moderate pace. Any slower and it might risk feeling. It might make Clementine look too deep into Gucci’s eyes and find within the cruel jewel of the Transgress Oblige. Gucci blinks. Clementine releases a sigh she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. She manages to weave it into the measured sway of her hips, up and down as Gucci and Clem circle each other. This is not a dance with a lead or follow. Partners cinch one hand about the waist and shoulder, the other entwined above head height. Gucci, uncharacteristically, sticks to the basics. It takes a minute of becalmed spinning for Clementine to realize what this means. All the time she’s spent dancing with knives at her back, Gucci has been holed up beyond nobility’s reach, conspiring. An old and nameless spark for Gucci bubbles up in Clementine’s chest. She decides it is jealousy. Gucci’s crew trusts her. She’s always been so Divines-damned personable. No wonder she has outmaneuvered Clementine every time. The strategies a captain can ideate when she knows her loyalists will follow them to the letter. And all that time to train with her mech.

Clementine lifts her arm to twirl Gucci. Gucci takes it, with some hesitation, legs in careful and slightly too-large arcs. It gives Clementine ample time to stare at the back of Gucci’s neck, at the shaved nape where a whisper of fuzz has only just begun to bloom. Clementine should have known what Gucci had become from the day she cut off her locks; over the last year, in erratic but inevitable spasms, Clem has inched towards the same zero length. Another stumble, another sheared lock. She wonders what it would feel like to touch the sides of Gucci’s head, just behind and beneath the ears. If she tried it now, her gloves would be in the way. When Gucci has finished her spin, Clementine pulls her in with a little excess force. Gucci stumbles to adjust.

“One more dance?”, Clementine proposes. She needs time with Gucci. She must uncover her. Tactically.

“Do you plan to keep my hands to yourself all night?”

“In marriage?”

“For a dance. When did you get witty?”

“I’ve picked it up from my...” Clem works on her response as she reaches across the little distance left between herself and Gucci. A strand of her hair has fallen on Gucci’s suit, ruining its stark mirage. “Squad. Talkative bunch. You’ve met them.”

Clementine plucks the stray hair and tosses it aside. Dancers have shuffled to their tables, exchanged partners, returned. Sovereign Immunity, whose capability for public-function stealth is enviable for a man of his bulk, manifests on the floor. Around his forearm is a very amused and only a little tipsy Ver’million Blue. Leap is nowhere to be found. The floor closes. Too late to refuse the dance now. The band cues into a brisk staccato assault, a complex piece full of stops and gos. This is Clementine’s favorite dance. Its origin found inspiration in a sporting variety of animal-human combat, the name of which has been long lost to time, despite Kesh’s best efforts. The lead attacks, the follower defends. There are parries, ripostes, deadlocks from which a wily follow can emerge in the lead. Clementine has her hand atop Gucci’s collarbone. She gives the traditional gentle shove, separating them both by a foot’s length; they remain joined only by holding each other’s forearms. Gucci appears, for one moment, confused. As if there were any other acceptable way for one of her status, in the battlefield and out, to respond to her provocation.

Go ahead, Gucci. Attack.

Gucci spins clockwise - Clementine, counter. Clem is pulled into Gucci’s center of gravity, with her back to her partner. A wisely timed frontal assault can prove more surprising than subterfuge. But Gucci forgets the little things, like the head tilt with which Clementine scorns her gaze. A wisp of Gucci’s exhale brushes her neck. They let go of each other’s arms. Clementine extends one leg, and Gucci matches it, cutting her off. Not quite a stalemate, with Clementine’s back exposed. When Gucci slides one hand around her waist, she offers the other up high. Clementine takes it, and they follow the synchrony of each other’s movement for three, four steps until Gucci stops. Clementine extends both legs and drops gently, her arc trapped by Gucci’s grip around her arms. She’s exposed to anything. But, on the way up, she unclasps the lead hand before Gucci expects her to, and now she has ample opportunity to flank her.

 _You’d never drop your advantage so easily_ , is what Clementine wants to say when she clings to Gucci’s shoulder, a position of ersatz helplessness. Any errant movement could result in a switch of dominance now. _You think I don’t know what you’re capable of?_

But before she can do anything she’ll regret, Gucci says: “Well, you’re having fun.”

Clementine thinks she might die. Does her habit of expressing inconvenient amounts of emotion extend to smugness, too? She hides it by stepping away, walking backwards to the very edge of the invisibly bordered space allotted to every dancer, luring Gucci into following her.

“I believe I’m not the only one. Even if this isn’t your specialty.” Clementine, at last, manages to sneak one leg behind Gucci.

“You wound me, Princess.”

“Save it.” Save it for when you’re calling me Princept.

“I hope you’re not holding back.”

And, in one rapid swoop, Clementine is behind Gucci, reversing the position they began in. 

“I wouldn’t dare insult you like that.”

As she guides Gucci back to the ring’s center, she realizes she means it. Gucci was her first duel, her first deadly opponent. It is by the blessing of her sabers that Clementine learned blood and victory both taste like iron. Clementine stops the walk with a hand on the small of Gucci’s back. The music comes to a duplicitous silence as Gucci arches the bulk of her weight over Clementine’s hand. She has her eyes closed, arms tossed above her head as if she didn’t know that Clementine is not to be trusted. She wants her to drop her guard. Instead, Clementine bends one knee, swooping into Gucci’s defense. It’s a difficult maneuver, requiring an egalitarian shift in balance from both lead and follow. Gucci, with her eyes closed, is unready. She slips. And Clementine surprises herself by catching her, a feat she’d have been incapable of a year ago. Gucci’s not the only one that’s changed, Clementine realizes. No one else makes her feel like a leader, a warrior, a face and body acting as one. Not the Kesh court’s sycophants, not her own crew’s backhanded compliments. Only the terrific Gucci Garantine, mere inches from the dance floor and further than ever, at opposite ends of this moon in the galaxy’s heart, plotting her demise.

Oh, that wasn’t a silent coda. That was the end of the song. And, Clem realizes as she gracelessly helps Gucci upright, they’ve made a bit of a scene. As if summoned for the exclusive purpose of chagrining Clementine, Exeter Leap stage whispers at Milly: “Ooh, the girls are fighting!” Sovereign Immunity has the good sense to pretend he’s focused on a stain on his immaculate blazer. Clementine’s blood boils. She takes a deep, obvious breath to calm herself. Every time she takes a step forward, everyone else pushes her ten back.

“Your necklace is crooked. Here.” Clementine snaps back to the sound of Gucci’s voice. She finds her rival’s hands brushing at her collarbones, as she fusses with one of the many loops around Clementine’s neck. She’s warm. But calm. Unflustered, despite all that - it would not behoove a seasoned fighter like her to get winded with one song’s worth of dancing. All Clem can look at, wants to look at, is her eyeshadow. Silver glitter. She’s killing her by inches. To think she had the upper hand, less than a minute ago.

“Your eyeshadow is smudged, here.” Clementine points wherever, lyingly. “Should I accompany you to the vanity?”

“Oh, no need-” Gucci catches herself as she finishes fixing Clem’s necklace. Clementine had been right. The privacy of a ballroom is no privacy at all. “I’d be honored.”

-

Clementine, by now, ought to have learnt to be careful what she wishes for. You make one proposition, drunk on momentary conviction. Suddenly, you’re locked in a washroom while your deadly enemy checks her makeup, and any distance you can take is wrong. Too far, and you might as well not have come at all. Too close, and you’re vulnerable.

“I didn’t know you could move like that.” Gucci scans her face in the mirror for signs of the makeup faux pas Clementine contrived.

Clementine leans against the vanity, gaze firm on the wall at Gucci’s back. She would not dare sit now. “Thank you.”

Gucci scoffs. She’s determined her eyeshadow is unbothered, and is now looking straight at Clementine. All of Clementine’s ballroom confidence is gone. She swallows dry acid. It’s always like this. She’s never figured out how to make the Panther do its transformation again.

“Is there something you need?”, Clementine defends herself.

“Is there something _you_ need?” Gucci raises one eyebrow. Clementine will never figure out how she does that. “You’ve been after me all night.”

“You’re just the only one there that can dance.” Clementine feels torn between two secrets. Worse: she’s not sure what the second secret is. She only knows the tremor that runs through her when she comes too close to spilling it, like when she admits Gucci can dance. She shields herself: “At least a little bit.”

“Hm.” Gucci crosses her arms, but doesn’t back away. “I let you win once, and you get cocky.”

“You did not let me win!” It dawns on Clementine that Gucci said ‘once’. The imperious voice with which Clementine draws her battle plans alerts her that Gucci is taunting her into breaking their silent consensus. As is often the case, her mounting frustration drowns the warning out. “It’s a dance. There’s no winners.”

“I’ve never seen anyone grin like that off the battlefield.”

“You haven’t been spending much time with me.”

“I’ve wanted to.” Gucci doesn’t shift her posture. A drop of melancholy tinges her voice, not enough to be contrite. “We’ve had our obligations.

“Right, we should focus on destroying each other,” Clementine snaps. Gucci’s presence, already magnetic, swallows the room, the gravitational pull of the name Saint Dawn inexorable as a black hole. The small part of Clementine’s mind that has escaped the feedback loop of the Transgress Oblige’s terror wonders if Gucci feels the same. Like Clementine is a sphinx, stately and ravenous, toying with her prey until the moment she devours it.

“The record there is strictly in my favor.”

Of course she doesn’t. The Rapid Evening is no threat to Saint Dawn. All its commander does is slip up, panic, secure someone else’s victory. Clementine never wins the fight Clementine wants to win.

“Need I remind you that I got what I wanted in Obelle?”, Clementine, unconvinced, snarks.

“Clementine, we’re not going to stand here and I-shot-you, no-I-shot-you all night. This isn’t a toy war.”

“It is!” Clementine’s voice climbs an octave too high. Her heart beats in her ears. “We’re just sitting on our hands, doing nothing, why I had time to put together a ball! Like there’s nothing going on, like I’m not gonna have to get out there and get shot at, and torn open, and...”

Clementine cuts off her spiel when she realizes her voice has crescendoed to the breaking point again. Gucci fixes her with a fiercely inscrutable look.

“You talk like you haven’t done all that already, many times.” Gucci uncrosses her arms. “You’ve borne the brunt of my own blade at least once. If you’ve been active even half the time my people were blockaded by Kesh operatives, you’ve shot and been shot at more than you can count. You’re a combat veteran, Clementine. What is it you’re afraid of?”

Gucci hasn’t taken her eyes off Clementine for one blink. Transfixed, Clementine missed the moment when they walked close together. She mumbles, possessed:

“It doesn’t matter. I never get what I want.”

“You don’t know what you want. Everything with you is so complicated.”

For once, Clementine has a perfectly reasonable counterargument. She knows what she wants. She has seen it in a vision, in excruciating detail, a fervor unmatched by the daydreams with which she once counteracted her ferocious bouts of boredom. But, last time she had this vision, Gucci was there. And now Gucci has her by the chin, and it is impossible, deathly impossible to contend with the will etched in her face. Clementine realizes there is a difference between what she wants and how she wants it, and that Gucci will always exist in the limit between.

Clementine tastes, first, chalky lipstick. Then, when Gucci opens her mouth, red wine. Clementine presses her tongue insistently in, and Gucci offers no resistance. Clementine feels, again, like she’s walked herself into a trap, but she was always going to fall into this one, it’s been a decade in the making, and now her hand is at the back of Gucci’s head and she remembers, stupidly, that she hasn’t taken her gloves off. Gucci enjoys it nonetheless. She twists her mouth when Clementine gasps and renews the kiss, both hands on Clementine’s waist, a little lower than when they were dancing. Like she’d been biding her time for it.

Clementine surfaces for air again. “Was that good?”

Gucci titters: “It must be exhausting to live like that.”

Gucci isn’t smug with anyone else. Only Clementine gives her a reason to. She knows her conceited smile well enough to know when she’s trying to suppress it, too. It’s a punishing privilege. Clementine turns away, indignant, but Gucci catches her by the chin again, guides her - firm, but not ungentle - back to its starting point. Clementine’s hands ache to match her tit for tat. In another version of this kiss, she has Gucci by the necktie, and she’s sitting atop the vanity so that it’s Gucci leaning up instead of her. Their bodies are pressed far too close together for that now. Lack of foresight, slow reaction time, have conspired to deliver her helpless to Saint Dawn’s hands, again. She almost misses it when her gloves snag on a conspicuous pair of dents at the back of Gucci’s neck. Those weren’t there last time they did this, in the rowing team locker room, in another lifetime.

“What are these?”, she asks.

“Battle scars”, answers Gucci, and tilts Clementine’s head up and to the side. Her lips find a shiver hidden in the crook between Clementine’s ear and her jawline, follow its roadmap down the sensitive sides of her neck. With no egress to return Gucci’s kisses, Clementine presses her close, willing herself to breathe. That becomes impossible when Gucci sneaks one hand past the folds of her dress. Clementine bites her lower lip. She’s at her breaking point when she stops feeling Gucci. Her fingers have found the void cutting Clementine’s stomach from solar plexus to waist. Gucci’s touch exists only in negative, in the spaces surrounding the scar's deadened nerves. She’s stopped, unsure of whether or not to continue her exploration. Clementine opens her eyes, and finds her reflection in the vanity’s mirror.

“We should get back to the ball.”

Clementine chooses the diplomatic royal ‘we’, to belie the facts. No one expects Gucci back at the ball. Clementine put the whole celebration together for herself. It’s her who will be marked as a chronic flake if she fails to return.

“We don’t have to.” It doesn’t slip Clementine that Gucci uses ‘we’, too. But Gucci is attuned to a present Clementine doesn’t belong to. And Clementine answers: “You don’t understand”, because she doesn’t.

Time stops along with Gucci. She’s inscrutable again. This time, when Gucci’s leg slips out from between Clementine’s, she controls herself. She responsibly avoids looking her in the eye, so she won’t be tempted to walk her words back, ask her to stay and spend the evening trading wordless affections. She doesn’t chase after her as she turns and leaves, not even to ask her who she will be the next time they meet: Gucci Garantine or Saint Dawn, old friend or new flame. Only when the whole frigid room is hers again does she travel to the vanity to analyze the damage her dance partner’s nude lipstick has inflicted on her neck. She uncaps a bottle of makeup remover, careful not to get any on her gloves, and gets to work.

**Author's Note:**

> https://youtu.be/RWyVhIBmdGw


End file.
